1. How LSD Originated

In the realm of scientific observation, luck
is granted only to those who are prepared.

Louis Pasteur

Time and again I hear or read that LSD was discovered by accident. This is
only partly true. LSD came into being within a systematic research program,
and the "accident" did not occur until much later: when LSD was already five
years old, I happened to experience its unforeseeable effects in my own body -
or rather, in my own mind.

Looking back over my professional career to trace the influential events and
decisions that eventually steered my work toward the synthesis of LSD, I
realize that the most decisive step was my choice of employment upon
completion of my chemistry studies. If that decision had been different, then
this substance, which has become known the world over, might never have been
created. In order to tell the story of the origin of LSD, then, I must also
touch briefly on my career as a chemist, since the two developments are
inextricably interreleted.

In the spring of 1929, on concluding my chemistry studies at the University of
Zurich, I joined the Sandoz Company's pharmaceutical-chemical research
laboratory in Basel, as a co-worker with Professor Arthur Stoll, founder and
director of the pharmaceutical department. I chose this position because it
afforded me the opportunity to work on natural products, whereas two other
job offers from chemical firms in Basel had involved work in the field of
synthetic chemistry.